Everyone is talking about AI. And for personal branding, the conversation is complicated. On one side: genuine opportunities to speed up your content process, generate better ideas, and work more efficiently. On the other: a growing landscape of personal brand content that all sounds the same — because everyone's been copying and pasting from the same tools.
In this episode of Built To Be Seen, Caz and Toby get practical about AI — how to use it as a genuine asset, and where to draw the line to protect the authenticity that makes personal branding work in the first place.
AI Is a Tool for Ideas, Not a Ghostwriter
The single most important principle Caz and Toby share: use AI to generate ideas, not to generate final content. Ask it to brainstorm content angles, suggest topics your audience might care about, identify questions your ideal client is asking. Use it to spark your thinking, not to replace it.
When AI writes your content wholesale — when you copy and paste its output straight into a post — you're publishing something that could have been written by anyone. That's the exact opposite of what personal branding requires. Personal branding needs your voice, your specific perspective, your particular way of framing things. AI can't provide any of those.
"AI is brilliant for ideas. It's terrible for your voice. Use it to get started, then make every word your own before anything goes live."
Use AI to Understand Your Audience Better
One of the most genuinely useful applications of tools like ChatGPT for personal branding is audience research. Feed it information about who you are, what you do, and who you're trying to reach — and ask it questions like: what problems does this audience have? What questions do they ask? What content would genuinely help them?
The responses aren't perfect, but they're a useful starting point that can surface angles and perspectives you hadn't considered. The key is to give the AI enough context about you and your target audience first — the more specific you are in the prompt, the more useful the output.
Research and Structuring Are Where AI Shines
If you're planning a longer piece of content — a blog post, a video script, a newsletter — AI can help you structure it. Ask it to suggest how you might approach a topic, what sections to include, what arguments to consider. Use it as a thinking partner, not a writing service.
Similarly, for research purposes — finding statistics, exploring different angles on a topic, understanding something you're writing about — AI tools can speed up the process significantly. Just verify anything factual before publishing. These tools can and do confabulate.
"Think of AI as a very well-read assistant that's good at thinking through structures and angles. The thinking and the voice still have to come from you."
The LinkedIn Rewrite Button Is a Trap
Toby and Caz are particularly direct about LinkedIn's built-in AI rewrite feature: avoid it. Its output strips out personality and replaces it with generic corporate-sounding text that could have been written by anyone. It's the fastest way to make your content look and sound like every other bland post on the platform.
If you've written something genuinely good, trust it. If you want a second opinion on clarity or structure, ask a human. LinkedIn's AI rewrite serves LinkedIn's interest in keeping you on the platform — it doesn't serve your interest in standing out from it.
AI-Assisted Content Still Needs Your Edit
If you do use AI to draft anything — even as a starting point — treat the output as a rough sketch, not a finished work. Read every line. Remove any phrase that doesn't sound like you. Add your own examples, your own stories, your own specific perspective. The goal is that the final piece is entirely yours, even if AI helped you get started.
The tell-tale signs of unedited AI content are easy to spot: overly formal language, repetitive structure, a lack of personality, and phrases nobody actually says in conversation. If any of that's in your content, edit it out before it goes live.
The Audience Can Tell
Audiences are getting increasingly good at recognising AI-generated content. And the moment they sense it, trust drops. The whole point of following a person's personal brand is to get the perspective of a real human. When it turns out the content was primarily generated by a machine, the relationship suffers.
This doesn't mean avoiding AI entirely. It means using it transparently and responsibly — as support, not as a substitute for your genuine voice and genuine thinking. The personal brand is personal. That has to stay true no matter what tools you use to build it.